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I need to eat breakfast during the week. If I don’t, I have a serious crash and get mega hangry. Or I want to eat lunch at 11:00 am. Which doesn’t really work for me when I won’t be eating dinner until 6 or 7 on a weeknight. Getting up for work, I’m not ready to eat breakfast at 7 or 8. I like to eat it later on, because it keeps me satiated and allows me to eat lunch a little later.

I was making up scrambled eggs at home since the chickens are officially back into the habit of producing, but reheating them in the microwave left them a bit dry and rubbery. I found a post over at The Kitchn, which talked about poaching an egg in the microwave. I love me some poached eggs, so this news was amazing to me! Saves me some calories by not having to use butter to cook them, and I can have freshly made eggs for breakfast – on demand!

On the third attempt, I got a perfectly poached egg to smear over my multi-grain toast. Seriously. This egg poached better than the ones I make on the stove top. The trick I discovered is using already hot water, then microwave the egg for 60 seconds. If you read the post over at The Kitchn, they say to put the microwave at 50% power. Our work microwave lacks power, so I don’t do any adjustments and it works out great. If you have a newer microwave, I’d suggest starting at 50% power for 60 seconds and see where that gets you on the egg front. If it looks like it needs more cooking, give it another 30 second burst. I like a slightly runny yolk but a set white. The hot water sets the white without overcooking the center.

I think this is a great option for people who work in an office, or at any job where a microwave is available to heat up meals. Even college kids would benefit from this little trick!

Microwave Poached Egg

Tools:

Coffee mug

Small plate/saucer

1 egg

1/3 cup hot water

Put a splash of hot water in the bottom of the coffee mug. Crack your egg into the cup. Add in the rest of the water.

Put your egg filled mug into the microwave, and cover the top of the mug with the saucer – do NOT skip this part! It helps to steam the egg and prevents a hot mess if your egg explodes! ( I only had one incidence where the egg had a mini explosion, and it was before I was doing hot water and have started the microwave for another 30 seconds.)

Microwave for 60 seconds at normal power for older microwaves, 50% power for newer.

Once your egg is cooked to your liking, enjoy! I eat mine over a piece of multi-grain toast with some pepper and garlic salt. Add in some precooked bacon, and you’ve got a protein filled breakfast!

I’ve discovered something recently. My portion control had packed up and left me. Totally peaced out. So that meant I was eating larger than necessary portions, snacking in between meals on less than healthy stuff, and having one too many glasses of wine with dinner. The wake up call was the number on the scale. Don’t get me wrong – the number isn’t what matters to me. It is how my clothes feel. And my clothes were feeling hella small. The number on the scale was just the push I needed to start making changes.

Now, I don’t know about you but I cannot diet. I just can’t. As soon as something becomes off-limits, it is ALL I want to eat. So I started using My Fitness Pal again to keep track of my weight as well as all the food and drink I’m ingesting. I’m into week 3 and I’ve lost 5 pounds. Not huge, but slow and steady wins the weight loss race. I’m trying to lose weight, but I’m also trying to regain control of portions. To put more effort into planning my meals so that I refrain from eating convenience foods because I have a healthy meal on hand.

Here’s where the mason jar meals come into play. They are super portable. I have a plethora of jars due to my canning hobby. I can make a weeks worth of meals, and just grab a jar and have lunch ready to go. The lettuce or cabbage will stay crispy because it is as far away from the wet stuff – dressing/sauce – as possible. The meals are healthy. HEALTHY people! And full of flavor. The goal is to keep my lunches at 400 calories or less. This recipe falls around 300 calories – 14 grams of fat, 16 grams of protein, and is very filling from the combo of the quinoa and shrimp. I loved this meal.

As always, I make everything from scratch. I try to have cooked quinoa frozen in portions in the freezer. That way it’s ready to use for salads or side dishes. For the from scratch ranch dressing – this is by far the simplest dressing recipe I’ve ever experienced. Everything goes into a mason jar, you shake it up and boom.

Buttermilk Ranch Dressing: This is a big “to taste” seasoned recipe. The only thing I measure out is the buttermilk and mayo. The ratio of buttermilk to may is 2 to 1. So when I make a batch of this dressing for the week, I do 6oz buttermilk and 3oz mayo. I use the measurement lines on the side of my jars to show me.

For the additional flavor boosters (these measurements are not approximate, they are my best guess)

I use freeze-dried chives – probably about 1/4 cup

Dill – 1 tablespoon

Garlic powder: 1 1/2 teaspoons

Kosher Salt: 1 1/2 teaspoons

Black Pepper: 1 1/2 teaspoons.

Put all of these ingredients in a mason jar, shake like crazy and you have a ready-made, from scratch buttermilk ranch dressing that blows the store bought kind right out of the water.

Now onto the salad!

This list of ingredients will give you one salad. I usually make enough of everything to have a weeks worth on hand for my lunches.

You’re going to want to layer the ingredients in your wide mouth quart jar as follows:

1 tablespoon homemade buttermilk ranch

1 tablespoon 2% milk fat cottage cheese

1 tablespoon crumbled feta

4 tablespoons cooked quinoa

3oz (about 15) small cooked shrimp

2 cups chopped/torn romaine

When I am ready to eat it, I add a little splash of water to the jar so that the dressing and cottage cheese gets a little runnier and coats all of the lettuce. I shake the jar up, and them pour the salad onto a dinner plate. As you can see from the photo, this is a nice hearty salad. The lettuce stays crisp because it is away from the dressing. The shrimp and quinoa get some flavor from sitting in the dressing. It really is a great salad, and so filling. With warm weather looming, this is going to be my go to meal of summer!

Having backyard chickens means that there are times when we are buried in fresh eggs. Right now, the chickens are still laying pretty regularly, but the time is looming when the days get shorter and cooler and the girls will slow down production. So, while eggs are plentiful, I decided to pickle some. Beet eggs are usually the type that people are most familiar with. Since I’m limited in what I can do in the kitchen since I have no countertops, I decided to do a simple pickled egg and make it spicy. I made some jalapeno pickled eggs last year, but they really lacked the heat I was looking for. We grew habanero peppers in the garden this year, and they’ve done well. So I decided to use those for the heat factor. In 7 days, you’ll have nicely pickled eggs with a heat that varies. These are great to have on hand for a flavorful boost of protein, or to have out as a snack for guests with assorted meats and cheeses.

Habanero Pickled Eggs

18 hard boiled eggs, peeled

3 cups vinegar

3 cups water

1 teaspoon kosher salt

1 teaspoon dill

1/2 teaspoon celery seed

1 tablespoon pickling spice

6 cloves of garlic, mashed and roughly chopped into chunks

4 habanero peppers, tops trimmed off

Add all your ingredients (except the eggs) to a large pot and bring to a boil. Once boiled, remove from heat, stir and let sit to cool slightly.

Pour the brine over the eggs until the container is almost full. Be sure to get the peppers, garlic and any pickling spices from the brine into the jar so that they can continue to flavor. You will have extra brine, but that is ok.

Add the lid to your jar and let cool for about an hour, then place in the fridge for 7 days to allow the mixture to pickle. Shake the jar each day to get the seasonings, spices and peppers to move around and flavor your eggs evenly.

Well hello sarcastic followers! I know, I know. I’ve been MIA again. SO much going on. Weddings, weddings and more weddings. An unscheduled kitchen demo and remodel (another post!), raising new baby chicks and incorporating them into the current flock, gardening, and just life in general has been…hectic. BUT, I’m baaaaaack!

With summer drawing to a close, I was on the hunt for a recipe that would let me use of the last of the fresh basil. I froze a container full to use during the colder months, but still had a nice amount left of the plants that hadn’t been attacked by bugs or started turning brown. Then the the kitchn showed me a way with Lemony Ricotta Pasta with Basil. After I read the comments, I made some modifications since there were people saying it lacked flavor. I doubled the lemon juice and zest, didn’t really measure the ricotta (so I’m sure I used more than the 2 cups, probably by about 1/2 cup), and added in garlic. I used an egg pasta for a little bit of a richer taste. The result was a bright, flavorful dish that was like summer in a bowl.

Hubs loved this dish as much as I did. If I were to serve it to a group for dinner, I’d use it as a side with some baked chicken and a salad. It was so quick to put together!

Salt and boil a pot of water large enough to fit your pasta of choice.

In a large bowl, mix your ricotta, parmesan, lemon juice and zest. Set aside.

Add your olive oil to a pan and heat over medium flame. Once oil is heated, add your minced garlic and cook for 3 minutes, stirring so it does not burn. Add your garlic oil mix to your cheese mix, stirring to combine. Salt and pepper to taste (I went heavier on the pepper for more flavor).

Once pasta is cooked to package directions, drain – reserving 1 cup of the pasta water. Add ¼ cup of pasta water to your cheese mixture and stir to combine. Add pasta and basil, stirring to combine. If you would like the sauce to be thinner, add more pasta water until you reach your desired consistency. The heat from the cooked pasta and the pasta water will warm the cheese sauce and make it nice and creamy.

Serve immediately! If you have leftovers, save any leftover pasta water to add to the mixture when reheating. This will keep the sauce creamy and delicious.

So, about the title. Ya, that is a mouthful and a half. However, I feel like it all needs to be outlined in the recipe title, because you don’t want to forget critical bits of information. Like the spinach. The fact that it’s not layered lasagna, but lasagna ROLLS. And that there is a sauce of squash, not tomatoes. Oh, and it has roasted garlic in it. One cannot forget about the garlic.

I originally saw this post over at Skinny Taste and thought wow, what an awesome way to get some more veggies into a meal and I happened to have some butternut squash on hand. It was meant to be. Now, obviously I adapted this recipe so it didn’t turn out quite as healthy and lower fat as hers, but it’s pretty damn amazing. I always use full fat cheeses, and freshly shred my own. Why you ask? Because I don’t like that they have to do something to take the fat out of a food. Plus, the flavor is so much richer with a full fat cheese. Why shred your own cheese? That way I don’t get an extra helping of cellulose fibers (what they use in pre-shredded cheeses to keep them from sticking). It doesn’t take a huge amount of extra time to bust out the box grater and shred some cheese for a recipe.

Since there is some extra prep work to this recipe with the roasting of the squash and garlic, I like to roast the squash/garlic over the weekend and puree the sauce so that this can be a quickly assembled weeknight meal.

If you end up without enough cooking liquid left over after you roast your squash, add in some chicken stock until it reaches your desired consistency. Mine turned out kind of like pumpkin pie mix prior to adding the milk, but after the eggs and sugars are added if that helps to give you a visual. You could totally go thinner if you like, but I wanted it to be a bit thicker.

The flavors of this recipe really work well together, and all the fiber you get from the squash really helps make it a filling dish. I will certainly be making this one again. It was worth the effort of roasting my squash, and the roasted garlic gives the sauce a nice depth of flavor that you just wouldn’t have if it wasn’t part of the recipe.

I hope you enjoy these as much as we do! The photos below do not do it justice. Seriously. Just make it. The hubs only gripe? No meat. So leftovers will be provided with some turkey meatballs. Because they are good too.

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. In a shallow baking sheet, place your butternut squash halves skin side up. Add 1- ½ cups water to the pan and put in oven. Roast for 40 minutes, or until fork tender.

While your squash is roasting, put your head of garlic in a small oven proof dish, drizzle with olive oil and a sprinkling of kosher salt. Place in the oven with the squash and check on at 20 minutes. Garlic should be fork tender, with the tops of the cloves nice and brown.

Once your squash is cooked and your garlic roasted, let cool enough to handle. Scoop out the flesh from the squash and squeeze roasted garlic cloves into a medium mixing bowl. With an immersion blender, blend until the mixture is smooth. Add in the cooking liquid from your baking sheet, stirring to combine until the mixture resembles a very thick sauce. Stir in parmesan cheese, and season with salt & pepper to your liking. In a 9 x 13 baking dish, spoon a thin layer of the squash sauce, setting the remainder of the sauce aside.

In another clean mixing bowl, add in all of the lasagna roll ingredients, with the exception of the noodles. Stir until combined.

Lasagna roll assembly:

Lay out a piece of waxed paper to keep noodles from sticking to the counter. Add a layer of the ricotta mixture to the center of the noodle, leaving 1 inch of the noodle end free of the ricotta mixture.

Roll noodle up and place seam side down into your baking dish. Continue until all noodles are filled.

Top noodles with the remainder of the squash sauce, sprinkle with parmesan cheese and cover your pan with foil. Bake in your 350 degree oven for 40 minutes.

So, um, wow. I haven’t blogged for over a month. Now that I’ve had this epiphany, I feel it’s a little ridiculous because I’ve been cooking my ass off making all this from scratch food. Lots of squash type dishes. Complete with photos. And yet, not a blog post to be found for over a month. Damn.

Well folks, don’t you worry your pretty little faces off anymore. I am back. I have recipes out the wazoo. But since it’s been so long, I wanted to start off simple. With a different twist of pesto sauce. Most of the time when you think of pesto, you think of basil, pine nuts, olive oil and parmesan cheese. Which is delicious and simple in its own right. BUT…what if you were to try a pesto made from peppery arugula, mixed with salty parmesan and nutty roasted almonds?!?!?!? Have I blown your mind yet?!?!?!? It’s a simple list of ingredients, and the only other tool you need to make this is a food processor. And like, 5 minutes. Really. I made a bunch of this and froze it into cubes so that I could use it on pizzas, in sauces, or as a cooking medium for chicken. It’s pretty versatile. And tastes wonderful. For reals.

Arugula Pesto

7oz bag of arugula

1/2 cup shredded parmesan cheese

Pinch of kosher salt

1/2 cup olive oil

2oz toasted almond slivers * see notes below on how to toast

Add your arugula, cheese, almonds and salt to a food processor and pulse until combined. Depending on the size of your food processor, you may have to add the arugula in batches (I did). Once all of the arugula has been processed, turn the processor on and slowly pour in the olive oil until combined. Use immediately on whatever tickles your fancy, or freeze for later use.

Spoon into ice cube trays and let freeze until solid. To remove cubes. set the ice cube tray in a shallow dish of hot water to loosen up the pesto cubes. Place in a freezer safe bag or container and use as you need to!

Notes:

To toast almonds, put in a dry skillet that has been preheated over a medium flame. Toss around until they start to brown. Let cool completely before adding to food processor.

I realized when looking into my freezer, stuffed to the gills with bags of frozen garden tomatoes, that I had never posted the recipe for Tomato Basil sauce last year. Then I looked at my drafts and confirmed it. And I’m thinking, hmmm….we are coming up on the end of tomato season here in Pa, with the last bushels available for purchase at the local farms thinning out and thought ya, I should probably post that recipe. You know, as a reminder to folks who want to can some sauce to get their hands on some tomatoes…and those who have tomatoes get canning! Below is my original, forgotten about post from Tomatopalooza of 2012. Tomatopalooza of 2013 hasn’t happened yet, so I don’t know what my sauce yield will be. I still have some sauce on the shelf, so I’m not in a huge hurry to get on canning sauce. Plus, I’m waiting for hubs to hook me up with an outdoor propane stove so I can can on the deck under the the open sky. *hint hint hubs*

Enjoy the post from the past!

Tomatopalooza continued – this round consisted of a basic pasta sauce with simple flavorings so that it can be canned and stored for later use. With the surplus of tomatoes I have in the freezers, I needed to get a head start on making pasta sauce. We don’t eat TONS of pasta anymore because of the heaviness of it and the fact that it packs on pounds unless you are planning to run a marathon – so pasta becomes a special treat instead of a weekly meal. But I wanted to stop having to buy canned pasta sauce. I have become a huge fan of being able to look at a the jars on my shelf and be able to recite – and pronounce – all of the ingredients, regardless of the jar. And gifting someone a jar of something I made from scratch is so fulfilling. People are so appreciative of something, anything in a mason jar. And canning makes me feel proud and empowered. In control of my food source. It also makes me feel in touch with my family history because my Bubba was the canning icon in our family. Sadly, she passed away when I was only 7 so she never got to share her wisdom with me but I can feel her in the things I do.

This batch of sauce was something I spread out over 2 days. Since all my tomatoes were frozen, I thawed them in a HUGE pot over the next two nights, draining off any of the water that seeped out of the tomatoes (this made the cooking down process much faster!) and piling more in as the tomatoes settled and squished down. Out of roughly 40lbs of tomatoes, I ended up with 8 quarts + 6 pints of sauce. It wasn’t super thick like some of the commercially produced sauces but it was a nice consistency. We had some for dinner and with it being just a basic tomato sauce I added spinach, ricotta cheese, some salt and some cooked sausage. It was great!

I have linked to the original post on the Ball canning site for those of you wanting to not do such a huge batch of sauce. Me, I can’t help but do everything in bulk!

The day before cooking sauce, thaw your tomatoes in the pot you will be cooking them in. Drain off any “water” that seeps out of the tomatoes. Add your onion, garlic and basil to the pot. Use a potato masher to break up the frozen tomatoes. Cook until everything is boiling and onion is soft.

Strain the mixture through a food mill to remove seeds and skins. (At this point, you may put the strained sauce into the fridge and cook down another day)

Cook the strained mixture down until reduced by half for a thin sauce.

Add your citric acid/bottled lemon juice to each jar according to size. Fill with sauce to 1 inch headspace. Add to PRESSURE CANNER and process for 15 minutes for both pints and quarts at 11lbs of pressure, adjusting for your altitude.

No pressure canner, or you’re scared of it? You can process jars in a water bath canner as well: 35 minutes for pints

Let cool on counter for 24 hours. Remove bands and wipe down jars and store in a cool dark place for up to 1 year. Any jars that did not seal can either be reprocessed or stored in the fridge for use.

The Pioneer Woman
Ree offers great cowboy/cowgirl food as well as fabulous tutorials on how to create the recipe. this is not a diet website, so don’t go here looking for lowfat. It’s food your gram made!